Practitioner Profiles offer a view into the factors at play within various collecting organizations that impact metadata decisions at the collection or project level. The members of the Oral History Association Metadata Task Force offer their own profiles here as examples. Reading these profiles may spark your own thinking prior to completing the Practitioner Profile questionnaire.
What metadata we choose to capture and preserve is motivated by important factors such as the needs of our researchers, the capacity of our staff, and the promises we have made to interview contributors. Each collection has its own needs, so it is not uncommon for different collections, even within the same repository, to have differing amounts of metadata, organized in different ways. The OHA Metadata Task Force encourages practitioners to make decisions about metadata that are based on real world needs and circumstances of each collection and repository, while still allowing the content and context to be understood by viewers and researchers. Since metadata for oral history is never a one-size-fits-all kind of endeavor, we offer these practitioner profiles as a way into the thinking behind metadata decisions:
Lauren Kata – University Archivist – NYU Abu Dhabi
Natalie Milbrodt – Metadata Librarian – Queens Public Library
Steven Sielaff – Oral History Collection Manager – Baylor University
Jaycie Vos – Special Collections Archivist – University of Northern Iowa
After viewing the below profiles, if you would like to move forward to Step 2 of our Assessment and Planning Process and fill out your own profile, you can find our profile questionnaire HERE. To navigate back to the toolkit main page, CLICK HERE.
